adam.oliner.net

Observation #1: There is always something going on. Observation #2: I don’t like writing half-assed blog entries. Together, these explain the recent emptiness of this page. That is, not lack of material, but lack of time for adequate treatment. I realize that, sometimes, you have to do things you don’t want to do. My half-assed treatment of recent events follows.

The AIM-stalkers among you know perfectly well what has been keeping me busy. My Master’s thesis is due on May 19th. It is not near done. Perhaps that is due, in part, to the fact that I am blogging today; this is the one week mark. Despite this state of affairs, I am optimistic that the thesis will achieve Not Suck status and avoid being immortalized as a document for which I feel forever compelled to offer an apology.

Today marks another milestone: my last class as an MIT student. After today, the next time I set foot in a classroom will be this fall, in California. (Huzzah for natural segues!) Soon enough, I will be packing up my things and trekking across our great nation to begin my next half-decade journey. September will find me starting as a Stanford University Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department. Furthermore, I am excited to announce that I am one of two people to have been chosen this year to receive the Department of Energy High Performance Computer Science Fellowship (DOE HPCSF). This means that tuition and fees are paid for, I get a stipend, and I get a workstation allowance. It also means that I am being flown to Washington DC for a fellowship conference, which leads naturally (double huzzah!) to my next topic: travels.

Between the middle of June and the middle of September, I will be traveling to DC, Japan, Vermont, San Diego, and Palo Alto. On June 19th, I fly to DC for my fellowship conference. I return to Boston June 21st, only to fly to Tokyo the next day. Yes, friends, I am going to Japan. My official business there is to present a paper at DSN 2005, but no way in hell was I going to spend the entirety of my first trip outside the country (who is Canada kidding?) sitting in conference talks. Instead, I planned to arrive a good five days before the conference starts, with the intention of experiencing Tokyo, Kyoto, and the general Japanese food and culture, before finally heading to Yokohama, checking in at the Grand Intercontinental, and preparing my talk.

I will leave Japan, reluctantly, on July 2nd. In a feat of time traveling, I will land at Chicago before I take off from Tokyo. I’m told the International Dateline has something to do with this bizarre violation of the time-space continuum, but I think the person was just trying to confuse me. In all, the trip from Tokyo to Boston will only take around 2 hours, local time. Silly.

After landing in Boston, presuming I am not dead tired (or simply dead not-living), it will be time for me to pack my things and drive to Vermont, where my friends and I convene annually to discuss issues of weighty significance, to compose immediately relevant haikus, and to kill many many imaginary things. There will also be much hot tubbing, pool playing, BBQing, and card playing. Last year’s pics and blog entry might refresh your memory.

I then spend a little while at MIT, where I will technically be employed by IBM but be doing all my work here in Cambridge. My primary task is to implement my Master’s thesis idea (cooperative checkpointing) on BlueGene/L. It’s a good deal, all said, because I get to stay in Boston, be paid my IBM, implement my research on the world’s fastest computer, and continue working with Larry.

In mid-August I get kicked out of MIT housing. Instead of going home, I am flying to San Diego for some kind of family jive, the details of which are unclear to me. Before that, however, I should share the news that my parents are moving. My dad got a rather large promotion, so they’re leaving Cheshire and moving to nearish Boston. This doesn’t mean I’ll never visit, it just means that I’ll never go home to Cheshire again.

The summer will end with a road trip. I plan to drive across the country, hitting fantastic landmarks and sights along the way, eventually ending up at Stanford, where the next era will begin.

Tomorrow at 5 AM, I embark on what will be the last of my grad school visits: UIUC. Two weekends ago was CMU, but time constraints forbade me from blogging about that particular experience. I suspect you’ll be hearing more about it, eventually. I’ve been to UIUC before, so pictures will not be forthcoming. I am, however, flying directly from Illinois to Denver, where I will be giving a paper talk at IPDPS 2005, specifically the Workshop on System Management Tools for Large-Scale Parallel Systems. Alternatively, you could use the easy-to-remember acronym IPDPSWSMTLSPS. Wish me luck.

Daniel would like to coin the term megooglemania, which he defines as: a delusional mental disorder that is marked by infantile feelings of personal omnipotence and high page rank. Symptoms include frequent googling for one’s own name, or variations thereof, and engaging in contests of keyword domination (”Bayesian event prediction,” “fault-aware job scheduling,” “probabilistic QoS supercomputing”). Help spread the word. Literally.

Finally, I want to pay my respects to the only person who died this week who actually had a positive impact on my life: Mitch Hedberg. He passed away under appropriately ironic circumstances; he died in a town called Livingston and the news broke on April Fools Day. Sadly, it was no April Fools prank, as many had initially hoped. If you don’t know his work, go buy his CDs. Funny, funny stuff. I imagine that he’s up in heaven right now, wearing a beret and smoking real pot with some dead guy who looks like Peter Frampton, beaver in tow.

Dear Apple,

As a company fond of using adjectives like “insanely great” and “no competition”, you are probably not familiar with the concept of understatement. Thus, I was surprised to discover a rather modest claim on your homepage. An image for the iPod Shuffle boasted “240 songs. A million different ways.” Because you can listen to all your songs in a random order, there are certainly very many different ways to listen to 240 songs. But a million isn’t even close.

Let me introduce you to !. He’s usually not alone, so let’s put him with 240 to make the number look shocked: 240!. That ! after a number means the number of ways you can order those items. It’s called factorial, and it means you multiply the number by itself minus one, and itself minus two, and so on. So 5! = 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120. So an iPod with only 5 songs on it still gives you 120 ways to listen. That little excited punctuation mark is interesting because it grows really really fast.

If you wanted a million different ways to listen to your iPod Shuffle, you only need 10 songs. 10! is actually more than 3 million. With 240 songs, you have more ways to order them than there are particles in the universe. If you wanted to really make a bold statement on your homepage, you should have proclaimed:

“240 songs.
40678853636470581204935759214868853101720512591828271460697559690
81486918925585104009100729728348522923820890245870098659147156051
90573256314738159909845924475246302768811570537170462828632662123
84565433072676086125451683377796691387594517603959682174236179543
30737034164596496963986817722252221059768080852489940995605579171
99966691600404296529389679980059807998526419511950668157762205621
50448516182362921369600000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000 different ways.”

I am not sure whether to be impressed by your modesty or concerned with your math skills. Regardless, I can understand your choice; “a million” has a nice ring to it.

Insincerely,
- adam

Nothing says “freaking blog already” quite like a blank home page. I am finally back at MIT, diligently working on my thesis. [pause for laughter] I don’t know why I haven’t posted, but a lack of material certainly isn’t the reason. WoW is partly to blame, because it did devour my soul for a few weeks. But I quit that addiction, cold turkey, a week ago. I now spend my time living on the 8th floor of S-P and working on the 8th floor of CSAIL. My thesis topic has changed over time, and it’s not worth trying to explain here. If you’re curious: ask. This semester will consist primarily of composing that document, TAing for 6.xxx, and taking a class (most likely 6.841). In preparation for the latter, for which I do not have the prereq, I am reading Sipser’s Introduction to the Theory of Computation. The fact that I have read half of this textbook, and thus far enjoyed myself, should be taken as high praise.

This shot was taken on New Year’s Day. (Roughly clockwise from left: Kelly, Anna, Me, Jamie, Marie, Heather, and Colin. Sean is behind you!) Legend has it that photos were taken of the night before, but someone hasn’t posted them yet. Instead, you will have to rely on this thorough summary of our festivities in Philly: they were fun. I’ve got a bunch of other pictures for you, and shall now deliver them bullet-style for your efficient consumption:

• As mentioned in my last post, Hung’s birthday was a blast, and pictures can be found here. Warning: not safe for karaokephobics.

• It snowed here in Boston. A lot. Above my knees everywhere, with drifts above my head. I didn’t take pictures, but Gillian did.
• My former crew-mate and friend Chris Vu is now performing shows in NYC under the name Vudoo Soul.
• We threw a surprise party for Eddie. While I was, again, derelict in my life-to-bits digital image capturing duties, Cindy was all over it like white on rice.

I have some other topics worthy of our time together, so keep checking back. I’ll be posting regularly again, scout’s honor.

Having officially accepted the spot in S-P, I can say with confidence that you will soon find me living on the 8th floor, mere feet from the incorrigible Daniel (2nd from left). From our perches high atop that tower overlooking Cambridge, the two of us will once again rain down our terrible silliness upon the helpless denizens of MIT.

On a related note, it looks like I’ll be the TA for Professor Winston’s 6.833, a.k.a. Human Intelligence Enterprise, a.k.a. 6.803, a.k.a. 6.xxx. Long-time listeners will recall that I took this class last term, and have mentioned it before. I consider the class to be the best one that I took at MIT, and I’m excited to be a part of it.

So all this leaves me in a pretty good spot. Housing: check. Funding: check. Advisor: check. Thesis topic: check. Kafka: Czech.

Finally, Anna came down to visit last weekend and, being the fantabulous host that I am, I took her into the city to do assorted Christmassy things. This includes looking at various trees with lights and naked babies on them. The first curious display was at The Met, where we observed an 18th century creche scene and extravagantly decorated tree. The elaborate exhibit included the birthday boy and his family, as well as the three wise men and their slaves. Ah, the bible. While I’m sure the whole event cost the museum a pretty penny, Anna and I eventually concluded that the display was “unrealistic.” We had dinner at a Japanese place, where robotic fish populated the tanks that lined the ceiling above the bar. Then we fought the crowd in order to see the Rockefeller Center tree, which was about as big and bright as I remember it. We topped off the evening with some pumpkin spice lattes at Starbucks, which didn’t seem unreasonably expensive, until I realized that they didn’t come with a $5 bill. Then we walked to the train; or, Anna walked and I jerkily flobbed*, having pulled my groin running the previous week. Anyway, we had a great time, and it all put me in the holiday spirit. That is, if the holiday spirit involves being tired and poor.

*According to legend, ‘flob’ is a verb meaning, “To move heavily or clumsily, with a dull heavy sound.” While it, theoretically, resides in the OED, I can only cite Heather as a source. Do with it what you will.